Google (2015)Copied

From 1999 Google's logo was a variation on Ruth Kedar's design, set in Catull, an old-style serif. By 2015 the company was showing up on watches, phones, TVs and voice assistants, and its design team said the brand had to work across that whole constellation of screens rather than just a white homepage. Designers from Creative Lab and the Material Design team ran a week-long sprint to rethink it.

The new logotype uses a custom geometric sans-serif, the face that became Product Sans, while keeping the familiar blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red sequence and the slightly rotated e. The brief asked for more than a wordmark: a compact four-colour G for small spaces such as app icons, and a set of animated dots that stand in for the logo during listening, thinking and loading moments.

This was done in-house by Google's own design teams.

Google unveiled the logo on 1 September 2015, about two weeks after announcing its restructuring under the new parent company Alphabet. Google said a stripped-down version of the new logo could be served in about 305 bytes, against roughly 14,000 for the old one, which mattered on slow connections; Cloudinary later pointed out that the figure applied to a special optimised format, not the images Google actually served. Reaction was split. The New Yorker ran a piece on why people hated it, critics compared it to a child's toy, and The Guardian's critic argued the change was driven by design austerity rather than legibility.

TechCrunch recorded the official reasoning on launch day. People now met Google across phones, watches and cars rather than a desktop search box, and the company wanted an identity that showed the Google magic working even on the tiniest screens. The design team described distilling the brand to four colours on a clean white background and rebuilding it, combining the mathematical purity of geometric forms with the childlike simplicity of schoolbook lettering. The small blue g icon was replaced by a four-colour G, mobile search pages and the Google app were refreshed the same day, and TechCrunch noted that the timing, weeks after the Alphabet restructuring, was hardly a surprise.

Of all the big tech rebrands of the 2010s, this is the one that most clearly changed the genre. Swapping a bookish serif for a friendly geometric sans made Google look less like a website and more like an operating system, and countless companies followed. It sacrificed some personality for consistency, but the thinking about how a logo behaves at tiny sizes and in motion was ahead of its time.